Arabic SEO is the work of ranking for searches typed in Arabic, which in the Gulf means Modern Standard Arabic, local dialects, Arabizi and queries that mix Arabic with English. It needs its own keyword research, a right-to-left site built correctly, hreflang between language and country versions, and Arabic written for readers rather than translated.
Why Arabic SEO is its own job
Arabic SEO isn’t English SEO run through a translator. The same need gets typed in several registers and spellings, the page has to render right to left without breaking, and Google has to be told which version belongs to which language and country. Get those three right and the Arabic half of your site starts earning its own traffic.
This is weekly work in our SEO services for UAE and Gulf businesses, and most of the Arabic problems we find aren’t exotic. A developer set right-to-left direction in CSS instead of HTML. The hreflang says ar-KSA, which isn’t a valid code. The Arabic pages were machine-translated the week before launch and never read by anyone from the market.
This guide follows the order we work in: keywords, then the build, then hreflang and URLs, then content, then the places outside Google where Gulf buyers search.
How do people in the Gulf search in Arabic?
They search in a mix of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), their own dialect, Arabic typed in Latin letters, and English brand or product names dropped into Arabic sentences. One buying need can show up as five or six different queries, and keyword tools treat each one as a separate term with its own volume and its own competitors.
MSA, dialect, and the word people actually type
Formal Arabic is what most businesses write. It isn’t always what people type into a search box on their phone.
Take a mobile phone. The MSA phrase is هاتف محمول. In Saudi Arabia most people say and type جوال. Elsewhere you’ll see موبايل. A phone retailer with only the MSA phrase on its category page has written for the dictionary, not the buyer.
Question words split the same way. MSA uses ما هو or ماذا, while a searcher in Riyadh might type وش, one in Jeddah ايش, and one in Dubai شو. You won’t put dialect question words in your headings, but they show you which questions people ask, and those questions belong in your FAQs.
Service words vary too. صيانة مكيفات (AC maintenance) and تصليح مكيفات (AC repair) are both common, and they don’t always return the same results.
Spelling: hamza, ta marbuta and the missing dots
Most people type Arabic on a phone without diacritics and without much care for spelling. أفضل becomes افضل. The ta marbuta at the end of a word (ة) gets typed as ه. Alef maqsura (ى) and ya (ي) swap, so مستشفى turns up as مستشفي.
Google often treats these as the same word. Not always, though, and keyword tools nearly always split them. The quick test: search both spellings from the target country and compare page one. If the results match, treat them as one keyword. If they differ, note which form the ranking pages use. Then write correct Arabic anyway, because deliberate misspellings make the page look careless to the people you want to convert.
Grammar adds a layer. Prefixes attach to words (و, ب, ال, لل), and many plurals are irregular: one restaurant is مطعم, several are مطاعم. “مطاعم في جدة” and “افضل مطعم في جدة” are related searches with different intent. The first is browsing. The second is deciding.
Arabizi and transliteration
Arabizi is Arabic written in Latin letters, with numbers standing in for sounds English lacks: 3 for ع, 7 for ح, 5 for خ, 2 for the hamza. So “mar7aba” is مرحبا. It’s everywhere in chat and social comments, and it turns up in search mostly around brand names, slang and entertainment.
Transliteration matters more for most businesses, because place names and products have no single Latin spelling. Jeddah is also Jiddah and Jedda. Khobar is Al Khobar and Alkhobar. Perfume sellers compete for oud, oudh and aoud; Gulf restaurants for machboos and majboos. Use the spelling with the most demand in your title and let the others appear where they fit naturally. Our Arabic to English transliteration tool gives a quick Latin draft of an Arabic term, which is a decent starting point for listing variants before you check each one against real search data.
Mixed-language queries
Gulf searchers switch scripts mid-query: “سعر iPhone 16”, “شركة seo في دبي”, “عروض Nike”. Brand and model names usually stay in Latin letters while everything else is Arabic. If your Arabic product pages convert brand and model names into Arabic script, you can miss exactly these searches. Keep the Latin name in the Arabic title.
A keyword research process that works
- Write seed terms in Arabic and English, per country. A Saudi list and a UAE list, not one “Arabic” list.
- Pull volumes in Google Keyword Planner with the language set to Arabic and the location set to the country you’re targeting.
- Find the Arabic queries you already get. In Search Console’s Performance report, add a query filter, choose Custom (regex) and enter
\p{Arabic}to see only queries containing Arabic script. - Look at the real results from inside each market. Our Search Location Changer extension shows Google the way a searcher in Riyadh or Dubai sees it.
- Group terms by intent, not by spelling, and give each group one page.
The smaller utilities we use along the way sit in our free Arabic SEO tools.
Setting up a right-to-left site that Google and readers can use
Put lang="ar" and dir="rtl" on the <html> element of every Arabic page, build the layout with CSS logical properties so it mirrors cleanly, isolate numbers and Latin text inside Arabic sentences, and load an Arabic font that stays legible at small sizes. That covers most of what breaks.
The W3C is specific: add dir="rtl" to the html tag whenever the document is right to left, and don’t set base direction with CSS, because the direction should survive when the stylesheet doesn’t load.
One thing surprises developers. Google says it doesn’t use code-level language information such as lang attributes to work out a page’s language. It reads the visible text. So lang="ar" helps browsers and screen readers, while Google judges the page by its words. An “Arabic” page with English navigation, English buttons and an English footer sends a mixed signal. Translate the template, not just the body.
What we check on every Arabic build:
- Mirroring. Logical properties such as
margin-inline-startinstead of left and right. Directional icons (arrows, chevrons, progress bars) flip; logos and video controls don’t. - Numbers inside Arabic text. A UAE number starting +971 can render with the plus sign on the wrong side. Wrap phone numbers, prices, model numbers and email addresses in
<bdi>or adir="ltr"span. - Forms. Test with an Arabic keyboard. Many phones type Arabic-Indic digits (٠٥٠) into phone fields, and plenty of validation scripts reject them.
- Fonts. Arabic typefaces carry many more glyph forms than Latin ones, so the files are heavier. Subset and preload them. Never add letter-spacing to Arabic text; it pulls joined letters apart.
- Titles starting with a Latin word. The W3C suggests a right-to-left mark (
‏) at the start so the title displays the right way round in tabs and bookmarks.
Commissioning a new bilingual build rather than fixing an old one? Our guide to picking a web design company in Dubai lists the right-to-left checks to run before you sign off.
Hreflang for Arabic and English, and for ar-AE and ar-SA
Hreflang tells Google which URL to show for which language and, optionally, which country. Use ar and en for language-only versions, add a region only when the content really differs by country (ar-SA, ar-AE), make every version list itself and all the others, and use full URLs.
Google’s documentation on localized versions sets the rules. The language code is ISO 639-1. The optional region code is ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2. You can’t give a country on its own, because Google doesn’t work out the language from a country code. Each version must reference itself and every other version, or the tags are ignored. And alternate URLs have to be fully qualified, https:// included.
The errors we find most often on Gulf sites:
| What we find | Why it fails | Fix |
|---|---|---|
ar-KSA | KSA isn’t an ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 code | ar-SA |
ar-UAE | Same problem | ar-AE |
hreflang="sa" | A region with no language | ar-SA |
| Arabic page points to English, English doesn’t point back | No return link, so both are ignored | Both pages list both |
Relative URLs such as /ar/ | Alternates must be fully qualified | https://example.com/ar/ |
Do you need separate pages for Saudi Arabia and the UAE?
Only if the pages would actually differ. Different prices or currencies, delivery terms, regulators, branches, phone numbers or product ranges justify ar-SA and ar-AE versions. The same text with a different flag doesn’t.
When you do split, keep a generic ar page for Arabic speakers everywhere else (Google’s own example does the same with English) and an x-default for everyone whose language matches nothing:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en/services/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ar" href="https://example.com/ar/services/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ar-SA" href="https://example.com/ar-sa/services/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ar-AE" href="https://example.com/ar-ae/services/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/en/services/" />That whole block goes on all four pages.
Two more rules from the same Google guidance. Subdirectories on one domain (/ar/, /ar-sa/) are easy to set up and maintain; country domains such as .sa or .ae give the clearest country signal but cost more to run, so pick them only with a reason. And don’t redirect visitors automatically by IP address or browser language, which stops both people and crawlers from seeing every version.
Arabic URL slugs: Arabic script or Latin letters?
Both can rank. Google’s URL guidance says to use words in your audience’s language, transliterated where that applies, and to percent-encode non-ASCII characters. The real choice is practical: Arabic slugs read well in the address bar but turn into long strings of codes when pasted into WhatsApp or an email.
Google’s own Arabic example shows the path served as %D9%86%D8%B9%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B9/%D8%A8%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A9, which is what a shared link will look like in many apps.
Our default is Latin slugs (English or transliterated) for service and category templates that get shared and linked, with Arabic slugs allowed for editorial articles if the CMS encodes them consistently. Two rules hold either way. Don’t mix scripts inside one path. And use the identical URL form in canonicals, hreflang, sitemaps and internal links, so Google never sees two spellings of one address. Paste a slug into our URL encoder to see exactly what people will receive when they share it.
What makes Arabic content rank, and convert
Arabic content ranks when someone from the market writes it for the way that market searches, it answers the same questions as your English page with local detail, and it reads like a person wrote it. Machine translation published at scale does none of that.
Google’s spam policies say so directly. The scaled content abuse section names generating many pages through automated transformations, translating included, where little value is provided to users. A translated draft reworked by a native writer is fine. A thousand auto-translated product pages nobody read is the problem.
What we look for in Arabic copy:
- A register that fits the sector. MSA for body copy in healthcare, legal, finance and B2B, where formality reads as trust. Gulf vocabulary where buyers use it, like جوال on a Saudi phone page. Lighter dialect in ads and social, rarely in page body.
- Local proof. Saudi pages that name Saudi cities, branches and delivery terms; UAE pages with the emirates you serve and the payment options people there use. Never the English page with the nouns swapped.
- Titles written in Arabic, not translated. Google trims titles to fit the screen, so check the Arabic title on a phone and put the main term first.
- Parity on facts. Same prices, offers and contact details in both languages. Mismatches are the first thing a bilingual customer notices.
- Structured data in the page’s language. Arabic pages get Arabic names and descriptions in their schema.
Much of our Arabic work is for restaurants and hospitality in Saudi Arabia. We built the site and run SEO for Lola, a French brasserie in Jeddah, and run SEO for Toki, a Cantonese and Szechuan fine-dining restaurant in the same city.
Where Gulf searchers look besides Google
Google Search and Maps are where most Arabic SEO effort goes, but Gulf buyers also search on YouTube, on social apps and inside the marketplaces of each sector. An Arabic search plan should cover the places your buyers actually look, not only your website.
- Google Maps. For anything local, the Maps pack comes before the website. Reviews written in Arabic, and answered in Arabic, tell Arabic searchers you serve them. Our local SEO work covers that side.
- YouTube. Arabic how-to, unboxing and review videos rank on YouTube and often show up in Google results as well.
- Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. Discovery for restaurants, fashion, beauty and events often starts here, through Arabic hashtags and dialect captions.
- Marketplaces. Shoppers search inside Noon and Amazon. Diners search Talabat, HungerStation and Jahez. Property hunters use Bayut, Property Finder and Aqar, and Saudi buyers of used goods use Haraj. Each has its own search box, its own ranking rules and its own Arabic listing fields.
- AI assistants. ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot answer in Arabic and quote pages that state facts clearly, one more reason to publish real Arabic pages. That’s the territory of AI SEO.
Arabic SEO in Riyadh and in Dubai are different projects
In Riyadh, Arabic is usually the main language of local search, and in our experience an English-only site misses much of the demand for local services. In most Dubai sectors we work in, English carries more of the commercial search, and Arabic matters most for businesses selling to Emirati and Arab families, to government-linked buyers, or across the GCC from a UAE base.
So the starting point changes. For a Saudi business we usually build the Arabic keyword map first and treat English as the second version. For a Dubai business we often start in English and add Arabic pages where Search Console and keyword data show the demand. Each market has its own page: SEO in Riyadh and SEO in Dubai.
Adding an Arabic section to a site that already ranks in English is a small migration in its own right, with new URLs, new hreflang and updated sitemaps. Our step-by-step migration checklist covers that sequence. And if you’re hiring someone for Arabic work, ask who writes it; that’s one of the questions in our guide to vetting an SEO agency in Dubai.
A starting checklist
- Separate keyword lists per country, in Arabic and English, including dialect terms and transliterations.
lang="ar"anddir="rtl"on the html element of every Arabic page, with translated navigation, buttons and footer.- Phone numbers, prices and Latin names isolated inside Arabic text.
- Hreflang with valid codes (
ar-SA, neverar-KSA), return links and full URLs. - One URL form everywhere: canonicals, hreflang, sitemaps and internal links.
- Arabic copy written or edited by a native writer from the target market.
- Arabic listings on Maps and on the marketplaces your sector uses.
- A saved Search Console regex filter for Arabic queries, checked every month.